[CASE STUDY] What is the right time to start your Facebook ad campaign?

When to start your Facebook ad campaign is great question. Often times we are scared if we screw this up; FB will punish us with sky high prices and/or we will shoot ourselves in the foot and won’t stand a chance against our competitor. In fact, if you are doing Facebook, you will always hear the advice “start your campaigns at midnight when the account resets”. Everyone swears by this; but I don’t trust anyone – I trust data. So I did another paid test, and I am sharing the results of this split test with you for free.

My target audience lives in California, they start their day at around 7AM according to my page insights tool. So it was logical to have one batch test for when they start their day.

My other batch in the test is the infamous account reset time, aka midnight.

All of the ads in the test are the exact same, exact same angle, and image combination. There’s many; just so we can use the 80/20 rule to come to conclusions.

As you can see, 80% of the time it IS NOT cheaper to run at account ‘reset’ time. In fact, looking at the CPMs they are way more expensive 80% of the time when you start at midnight vs starting at the beginning of the day when people wake up and start using FB.

This isn’t me talking, it’s data talking. BELIEVE IT!

48 HOUR UPDATE – 48 hours have now passed since I started this experiment. And the numbers continue to work in favor of starting campaigns at the beginning of your target audience’s day. Check it out:

72 HOUR UPDATE – Looks like 8 out of 9 adsets favor starting ads at the beginning of your target audiences day. Not much has changed since day 1 – still that method is holding up as you can see:

96 HOUR UPDATE – Starting at the beginning of target audience’s day is still winning. Starting at midnight, the CPM’s are higher 80% of the time. We are ending our test here, after $600 dollars in spend I believe we have ENOUGH DATA to confirm our findings to be a FACT.

I knew starting at midnight was hocus pocus. I just wasn’t able to confirm it until I saw your data. I had had no problem starting and stopping campaigns at any and all times of day, then someone said do 12AM to 12AM, but my CPC’s were actually really high, so I ended up here. Thanks mate!